VMware opens Cloud Marketplace to partners amid new hybrid cloud moves

VMware has revealed it will open up its entire Cloud Marketplace to VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud provider partners. 

The marketplace features hundreds of open-source solutions from Bitnami, and enables customers to discover and deploy validated, third party solutions for VMware platforms, spanning public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

Bitnami, which was acquired by VMware in May this year, makes application packaging solutions providing the largest catalogue of click-to-deploy applications and development stacks for major cloud and Kubernetes environments. 

“This is a new solutions set marketplace, giving a one-stop shop for infrastructure services and our partner’s infrastructure services, but also for your application services - so the Bitnami catalogue is integrated into this, as well as any of the complementary infrastructure services from our ecosystem and ISV partners,” VMware vice president and CTO of global field and industry, Chris Wolf, said during a pre-press briefing at VMworld 2019.

The company counts more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners along with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. More than 70 million workloads run on VMware, which the company said of these, there are 10 million in the cloud, running in more than 10,000 data centres.

“No other vendor spans the hybrid cloud as broadly or as comprehensively as VMware," VMware COO products and services, Raghu Raghuram, said. "Our hybrid cloud platform is resonating strongly with customers and these innovations will further accelerate our cloud leadership, as we deliver an unparalleled level of consistent infrastructure and operations, from the data centre to the cloud to the edge."

In relation to this, VMware has officially stamped its VMware Cloud on Dell EMC offering, combining both VMware’s compute, storage and networking software (vSphere, vSAN and NSX) with Dell EMC VxRail hyper converged infrastructure, delivered as a service.

“It gives you the full cloud infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) model with the ability to officially run that IaaS where ever you want. That’s important, some customers may have privacy or regulatory issues, latency considerations or application dependencies -- we want to bring the cloud to them, instead of moving things out into the cloud,” Wolf said. “This is a fully supported cloud IaaS that the customer can deploy on premises.”

New advancements in VMware Hybrid Cloud operations were also announced with vRealize Operations 8.0, which will incorporate machine learning capabilities, spun out of Project Magna that was announced last year, Wolf said.

“This is giving dynamic application tuning capabilities where we’re learning the infrastructure around the app and being able to optimise that application for performance on a given infrastructure footprint,” he said.

“This is key because you think about application tuning today, you might have thousands of different knobs that you can tune to get that application right -- but which knob do you do? Sometimes there’s a lot of trial and error, so when you start to apply machine learning technologies to performance optimisation, you’re getting into a really important space."

VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, a SaaS offering, is also now in tech preview.

The vRealize Automation 8.0 solution will enable IT and DevOps to automate the self-service deployment and day two operations of complex applications, VMs and containers on any cloud. It also has enhanced ServiceNow, Terraform and Git integration.

The solution will be built upon a container-based microservices architecture that is easier and simpler to install, with improved performance and high availability, VMware said. These services will also be part of the vRealize Suite 2019, and available as part of vRealize Automation Cloud, previously known as Cloud Automation Services. 

On top of this, it will also extended CloudHealth as a new hybrid service offering optimisation, migration assessment governance and security. Additionally, it has also made migration enhancements with VMware Cloud on AWS.

Wolf said its hybrid cloud extension tool can now operate across multiple AWS regions, making migration and interconnectivity between regions simpler. 

New Workspace ONE capabilities

VMware is bringing a ‘digital concierge service’ in the form of a virtual assistant to Workspace ONE platform, backed by IBM Watson. 

VMware says it is the first digital workspace platform to integrate an artificial intelligence (AI)- powered virtual assistant, to be dubbed Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub Virtual Assistant

This will give employees the ability to complete numerous IT and HR-related tasks such as procuring and registering a new device, troubleshooting Wi-Fi, opening and managing service desk tickets, and enrolling into company benefits, VMware said. 

“For customers, we need to eliminate help desk calls, that’s real dollar savings for them. We expect to see a really strong reception to this virtual assistant,” he said. 

It will also contain mobile flows integrations to support HR, line of business and IT service management (ITSM) applications, VMware said.

VMware is also offering a tech preview of a new Digital Employee Experience Management service that enables IT to proactively detect and automatically remediate potential issues that might impact employee experience across their hardware, OS and applications, based on real-time telemetry from their digital workspace environment. 

“We’re also doing continuous verification because things change. I may be in a different region globally or we may observe some suspicious behaviour with a user endpoint device. When we see any behaviour anomaly on a device, that can trigger an automated action,” he said.

Julia Talevski attended VMworld 2019 in San Francisco as a guest of VMware.